Tag: agile

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Project Manager vs. Project Leader: Which Are You?

Two project managers at table discussing a project

As a professional in project management, you don’t only manage projects, you also lead teams. So, being able to work as both a manager and a leader can help you excel and really stand out in the workplace.

It’s worth taking some time to uncover the things that differentiate a manager from a leader. After all, some people who are leaders might not make the best managers, and vice versa. But if you’re determined to be both, you can hone your skills to manage and lead more effectively.

Take a look at the information below on managers vs. leaders to figure out which one you are, and to gain a clearer picture of what you might need to do to advance your career.

Project Managers: Experts at Planning and Executing Projects

Outstanding project managers are capable of thinking strategically and solving problems creatively. And, as a manager, you need to be able to plan ahead, while also adapting quickly to changes that might occur throughout the duration of a project.

Managers are responsible for delegating tasks and responsibilities to those on their team. So they need strong interpersonal skills and communication skills to be able to get their message across, motivate others, and provide extra guidance to those who need it.

Put simply, the top managers have what it takes to get things done right. They know how to plan and organize a project, as well as how to control every part of a project until it’s completed according to stakeholders’ expectations.

Project Leaders: Experts at Inspiring and Motivating Others

Project leaders have a vision that they want to achieve. And they know how to motivate, encourage, and inspire others so that they, too, will want to bring that vision to life.

If you want to be a standout leader, others need to view you as responsible and trustworthy. Leadership goes beyond developing a plan, delegating tasks, and coming up with creative solutions to problems that might arise.

As a leader, you also need to be a good communicator and listener who takes feedback seriously. And if you can master the art of remaining positive even when things aren’t going according to plan, you can keep the members of your team going strong as well.

Key Differences Between Project Managers and Leaders

Even though they might seek the same end result, managers and leaders tend to take different approaches when working on a project.

Managers are known for:

  • Directing and instructing their team members
  • Being driven by the tasks that need to get done in order to finish a project
  • Being more controlling and rule oriented when working with others
  • Working towards minimizing and controlling risks
  • Thinking about the short-term
  • Planning details and then telling others about them
  • Having objectives that need to be met
  • Using control and consequences to get team members to complete tasks

Leaders are known for:

  • Coaching and encouraging their team members
  • Driving their overall mission and the purpose of a project
  • Being more inspirational and innovative when working with others
  • Willingness to take risks
  • Thinking about the long run
  • Setting a direction for a project and selling others on it
  • Having a vision that needs to be fulfilled
  • Trusting others to get the job done right

So, Which One Are You? And Are You Ready to Improve?

Whether you currently identify as a project manager or a leader, you can improve your skill set or change course completely when you pursue the right education and certification in the world of project management. It’s entirely up to you to decide which classes you want to take, but know that RMC Learning Solutions is there for you at every step.

The bottom line is this: managers and leaders play integral roles in business. And they do share many of the same qualities. After all, the goal of any solid manager or leader is to work effectively with others. They both strive to complete projects on time and according to expectations, and keep stakeholders and customers happy. They just happen to employ differing methods, but one type of professional isn’t necessarily better than the other, as they both hold value.

RMC offers virtual classes, along with eLearning courses and self-study products, that can help you become a more effective manager and leader. Whether you want to become certified in project management or you want to improve your skills in leading others, there’s a class for you!

Sources:

https://www.projectmanager.com/leadership-in-project-management

https://fairygodboss.com/career-topics/leadership-vs-management

https://www.resourcefulmanager.com/leaders-vs-managers/

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What is Hybrid Agile?

Close up of team using hybrid agile approach

Agile and Hybrid Agile approaches are very popular right now. As organizations respond to accelerating rates of change, they are adopting agile approaches and using hybrid agile approaches more than ever.  This post explains the difference between agile and hybrid agile approaches, what constitutes each category and why organizations are adopting hybrid agile approaches.

  1. What is a Hybrid Agile?
  2. Agile and Knowledge Work
  3. Why Agile is a Great Starting Point
  4. The Benefits of Moving Beyond Agile
  5. Assessing Your Agile Readiness
  6. Building Situational Knowledge and Skills

What is a Hybrid Agile?

First let’s define what hybrid really means. A hybrid is a combination of two (or more) different elements. Hybrid cars often combine internal combustion engines (ICE) with battery electric (BE) technology. They could alternatively combine ICE or BE technology with a hydrogen fuel cell. The type of propulsion system does not define a hybrid, only the fact it is a combination of different approaches. Hybrid vehicles can combine the benefits of low emissions with long range made possible by a large gasoline station network.

Hybrids occur in nature too. Mules are the hybrid combination of cross breeding a donkey and a horse. While both animals look similar, donkeys and horses are quite different animals. A horse has 64 chromosomes, a donkey has 62. A mule has 63 chromosomes and is a completely different animal. Mules are larger than donkeys, have more stamina than horses, along with tougher hooves, a better resistance to parasites and can eat a wider range of foods – making them great pack animals.

That’s the idea behind creating a hybrid. Combining elements to try and get the benefits from both sources. However, we need to be careful that the effort and uniqueness are worth it. Hybrid vehicles are more complex and heavier than single power source vehicles. Mules cannot reproduce, you have to cross breed a donkey and horse each time to get one. More people know how to diagnose and repair a gasoline powered car than a hybrid one. Project leaders require a working knowledge of both plan-driven and agile approaches to use hybrid agile, while teams members would benefit from a foundational knowledge or Project Management Fundamentals and Agile Fundamentals.

Agile and Knowledge Work

Agile is important to knowledge work. Knowledge work is where subject matter experts come together to collaborate on new and unique products and services. This might involve scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, software developers, or web designers working with the business to build something new. Each of these groups has specialized knowledge, typically no single person knows everything needed to complete the project. What is being created is new or sufficiently different to the sponsoring organization as such previous project plans and estimates are not particularly useful to predict progress.

Unlike traditional, industrial projects, complexity, uncertainty, risk and change rates are very high. Many knowledge worker projects are working on designs and solving problems. There is no visible building or road getting created, the work product is invisible and intangible.

Without visible and tangible reference work, it is necessary to use an iterative-and-incremental approach to determine fitness-for-business-purpose. Teams could attempt to analyze and predict all features and functions, but often initial use uncovers additional opportunities and requirements.

Trying to explain the nuances of iTunes or Netflix to someone who has never seen anything like it before is difficult. Incremental trial is faster and more useful than speculative big-design-upfront that cannot anticipate every interaction with user behavior or linked systems.

Why Agile is a Great Starting Point

Agile methods provide an excellent project platform. Agile approaches have many benefits including:

1. Prioritize Business Value and Risk Reduction:

    1. By focusing on the highest business priority items first, organizations have a higher probability of realizing the major benefits of the work.  When teams actively identify and address risk early on and continuously, teams stand a greatly chance of overcoming the risk or identifying an alternative.

2. Iterative and Incremental Development: Today’s projects often produce something new that has not been done before. Building smaller increments of work and getting feedback keeps the deliverables closely aligned with consumer expectations. Taking an iterative and incremental approach helps iron out technical feasibility and performance issues sooner.

3. Adoption and Improvement: Adoption and improvement are conscious decisions to act on feedback, change design or experiment with a new process. Seeking feedback, then acting upon it in a formal, consistent manner transforms the opportunities identified into lessons to be acted upon that move projects forward towards better results.

4. Increase Drive through Empowered Teams: Agile approaches leverage a team’s ability to manage the complexity of the work and figure out the best way to organize it.  When teams are given more authority and autonomy, it creates greater ownership and a drive to deliver better results.

5. Safety: Safety is an essential ingredient in creating an environment where the team feels assured that trying and failing will not be punished.  Building such an environment allows people to feel safe to ask questions that may expose vulnerabilities and not operate out of fear.

The Benefits of Moving Beyond Agile

Agile approaches can offer a great starting point. However, they aren’t enough to deliver success most of the time.  Agile approaches work well for small projects in receptive, supportive environments, but agile is not sufficient for challenging environments.

Your industry and the culture of your organization often determines its readiness and tolerance for transitioning to agile approaches. Therefore, it is important to realize that no single strategy will be correct all the time.  Some organizations struggle to fully adapt to agile while other’s take on too many agile tools and process and get distracted or bogged down. As a result, organizations abandon agile all together a go back to using familiar plan-driven project management. That’s why your tool kit and skill set needs to have a combination of predictive, plan-based methodologies and agile project expertise to navigate context-sensitive decision points.

Watch our OnDemand Webinar Hybrid Agile: How & Why?

Assessing Your Agile Readiness

To help identify the types of projects your organization undertakes, answer the following questions about the nature of projects you execute.

If you answered more on the left-hand side of the table, it would indicate you are engaged in mainly industrial type projects. This is good news for reliable execution and traditional project management tools and techniques should serve you well.

If you answered more on the right-hand side, you are firmly in the knowledge worker domain. You should consider moving from industrial project management approaches and adopt knowledge worker agile ones.

If you answered about equally from each column, you are in a hybrid environment. Here you likely need to draw on a combination of approaches to be successful. This is one scenario where a hybrid approach might be suitable, for projects spanning the industrial / knowledge work domain. There are two other scenarios to consider also:

  1. As a steppingstone to true agile.
  2. In environments that demand additional rigor or controls.

Building Situational Knowledge and Skills

Our next article “Reasons for Adopting a Hybrid Agile Approach” explains each of these situations along with how to implement agile and hybrid agile approaches. It highlights strategies that have been proven to aid successful adoption and identifies risk areas and common pitfalls to avoid.

RMC offers several ways to learn more about Plan-Driven, Agile and Hybrid Agile approaches.  New to agile and plan-driven project management, consider Rita’s Agile Fundamentals or Project Management Fundamentals.  RMC offers a variety of hybrid agile offerings including our Hybrid Agile Instructor-led virtual course, our Hybrid Agile on-demand eLearning course and our Beyond Agile book.

We also offer two hour long on-demand workshops that introduce you to a groundbreaking Hybrid Agile model and how you can use it to apply plan-driven and agile approaches based on the specifics of your projects.

Sources:
https://rmcls.com/adopting-hybrid-agile-approach/
https://www.leadinganswers.com/2021/12/beyond-agile-relentlessly-reduce-process.html

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Contract Issues in Agile Development

Two business people review signing a contract

There has been a significant amount of discussion regarding the tension between development and agile contracts. Many see this conflict as irreconcilable, citing provisions in the Agile Manifesto favoring “working software over comprehensive documentation” and “customer collaboration over contract negotiation.”

Those who see the conflict this way claim that lawyers are operating in an outmoded mindset and need to be educated about the agile method of doing business. These same people claim that lawyers perceive many agile practitioners as unrealistic and naive.

In my view, this so-called tension is the result of a misconception of the lawyer’s role and of his or her duty to the client.

Contracts and Agile Development

  1. The Role of the Lawyer
  2. Implementing the Parties’ Intentions through Form Contracts
  3. Similarities in Agile and Other Development Contracts
  4. Agile-Dependent Provisions
  5. Similarities between Agile and R&D Contracts
  6. What Would an Agile Contract Look Like?

The Role of the Lawyer

The lawyer’s duty is to protect the interests of his or her client. What does that mean, exactly? To those in the “lawyer as dinosaur” camp, it means that a negotiation is perceived as a zero-sum game, with success being defined as winning the maximum number of business points and shifting as much business risk as possible onto the other party. In fairness, I have seen negotiations go that way and, at times, lawyers take a leading role in those types of adversarial negotiations.

In my experience such types of negotiations are ultimately unsuccessful because the relationship and the business objective underlying the agreement usually fail. That doesn’t do anyone any good, and it can’t be viewed as truly protecting the interest of the client.

A lawyer’s job is to assist their client in reaching their business objective. Part of that responsibility includes reducing risk to the client. The definition of risk, however, cannot be compartmentalized into individual business points or contract provisions, and must include the overall goal of the contract.

In the end, the object of the contract is to document the intentions of the parties and to create a mechanism to implement those intentions.

Implementing the Parties’ Intentions through Form Contracts

Much has been written about the need for new and specialized modalities surrounding contracts intended to implement agile methodologies. For example, in 2008 the Norwegian University of Science and Technology conducted a detailed study of problems associated with contracts in agile development projects. This ultimately led the Norwegian Computer Society to adopt a standard form contract to be used for agile software development, maintenance, and service operations.  There are many other form contracts purporting to be agile friendly. For example, see the Draft/Contract for use in DSDM Projects (DSDM refers to dynamic systems development method, an agile methodology).

Although these form contracts can be useful, there are already existing procurement methodologies that can accommodate the iterative approach used in agile software development.

Similarities in Agile and Other Development Contracts

One reason existing form contracts can be used for agile is because agile development shares many of the same needs of other types of development. For starters, you need to identify the parties to the contract. You need to have an effective date and a start date. You need to state when and how the vendor will be paid.

In addition, as with other software contracts, there must be warranties from the vendor, such as one warranting that it owns the rights to the code it will be developing and selling to the purchaser. There should also be some software escrow provision allowing the purchaser to gain access to the code should the vendor file for bankruptcy or go out of business. These are just a couple of examples. There are many others.

Agile-Dependent Provisions

The tricky issue with contracts and agile development stems from the iterative process and the intentional lack of documentation regarding the scope of work or the performance characteristics of the product being purchased.

In a traditional procurement, there is normally a detailed specification or statement of work that sets the standard against which vendor performance will be measured and allows for a firm price. This approach won’t generally work in agile development. But there are other contract methodologies, such as those used in research and development (R&D), designed to deal with situations where detailed specifications are impossible. Such contracts may be adapted to fit into the iterative approach called for by agile.

Similarities between Agile and R&D Contracts

In many agile agreements the requirements, by design, are not well documented. The same can be said for R&D contracts. Parties often enter into R&D contracts without knowing whether the object of the agreement is even doable. One area where these contracts may differ is in the iterative methodology used in agile; however, this is not critical, and the iterative methodology can be documented.

What Would an Agile Contract Look Like?

As far as scope is concerned, both an agile and R&D contract would probably have a simple statement, not necessarily of work, but of goals. There would be provisions allowing for a re-scoping after every iteration, a process for identifying what was done and what was not done. With respect to those items that were not done, the contract would also document a decision process governing whether those pieces of work would be put into the next iteration, mothballed, or discarded. There would probably also be provisions for the re-scoping of work for the next iteration.

Payment would most likely be either on a cost-plus basis (with a fee or profit component) or for time and materials. Given the uncertainties of the project, a firm fixed price would most likely be impossible, but there could be a budget target or cost estimate that might go in at the front end, against which the project progress could be measured.

In this respect, an agile project would differ from R&D in that the end of the project would be defined as when the purchaser runs out of money, not when the goals of the project have been reached. Honestly, this would most likely be extremely dissatisfying to a purchaser, especially one that did not have a business history with the vendor.

There would also need to be provisions governing testing and acceptance, at the end of each iteration and at project completion. One issue is the criteria governing acceptance. If requirements are not defined up front, how do you determine what success looks like at the end? It could be defined by requirements set forth at the beginning of each iteration; the contract would require each successive set of requirements to be met for the project to be deemed successful. With this approach, one concern is the situation where all the pieces work, but the final product is unsatisfactory. In my view this is the largest problem with agile contracts, but in many respects it’s no different than an R&D contract where the parties have goals but no real knowledge of whether those goals can be achieved.

As long as the parties’ expectations regarding the final product are understood and documented up front, with the understanding that if the purchaser’s expectations are not achieved, the purchaser would only have limited recourse, then an agile-based contract would work.

Boilerplate provisions would be similar to those found in other contracts. IP warranties and indemnifications would be the same, as would severability, governing law, notifications, modification, confidentiality, and competition.

RMC is Here to Get You Started

In looking at agile contracts, the documentation requirements are not all that unique and can be fit into other more traditional procurement methodologies. There is no need to completely reinvent the wheel. Rather, the lawyer and practitioner need to keep in mind that they are creating an agreement in an environment of uncertainty, not unlike that found in an R&D contract.

In response to the growing relevance of Agile methodology for all Project Managers, the Project Management Institute (PMI®) has begun offering the Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) certification exam. RMC Project Management offers comprehensive exam preparation products, eLearning and classroom training options to help you earn PMI-ACP certification

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Project Management Approaches and Methodologies

Project manager discusses project approaches and methodologies with team

As a project manager, selecting the right project management approach and methodology is an important step you’ll need to take before starting work on a project. That’s because using the appropriate approach and methodology can make a major difference in the flow of your project and its successful completion.

  1. What is a Project Management Approach?
  2. What Are Popular Project Management Approaches?
  3. How to Select the Right Approach for Your Project
  4. A Hybrid Approach
  5. What Are Common Project Management Methodologies?

What Is a Project Management Approach?

A project management approach defines the overall mindset you have for how to manage the project. Should you plan it traditionally, meaning as completely as possible before you execute, or should you plan and execute the project incrementally? Your project management approach falls along a continuum between plan-based (traditional), and adaptive (incremental). On the other hand, there are many methodologies to choose from. While this might feel overwhelming at first, the nice thing is you can select an approach that best suits each project, and that will help you know what methods to choose. After all, every project is unique, so even though a an approach and methodology might work for one project, it might not for another.

As mentioned, you can use different project management approaches to ensure every project you lead will be a success. To simplify things a bit, we’ve put together overviews of  the most popular types.

1. Agile Project Management

The great thing about taking an agile approach to project management is it provides you with plenty of flexibility. You can change the way you do things as you go to adjust to change, and still keep your project on track.

Rather than following a strict, linear method, this adaptable and collaborative approach makes it easier to implement changes when needed. Therefore, your team may make changes as new learning about the needs of the project requires.

This approach can be helpful if you anticipate a project will need a lot of changes before completion. It’s also beneficial if your stakeholders want to give you frequent feedback as the project progresses.

Pro tip: When you’re ready to learn about how to apply agile principles and methods, RMC is here to help. You can enroll in courses to learn about agile, and we offer exam prep courses that will prepare you to become an Agile Certified Practitioner.

2. Waterfall Project Management

Unlike the agile methodology, waterfall (or traditional project management) provides a more linear,  approach that is less flexible once planning is completed. Basically, your team progresses from one phase to the other as they’re completed.

With this methodology, you rely on more detailed requirements as you move from the start of a project to its end. However, you don’t have the flexibility to make changes after your team starts working without carefully vetting them. For this reason, it’s a good choice when you know how a project needs to go and what the outcome should be.

The stages in this methodology include requirements and analysis, along with design and construction, testing, deployment, and transition to operations. So, if you want to run a project that’s carefully planned with a schedule your team can adhere to, and there’s a clear goal that can be planned in detail with stakeholders , the waterfall method can be a suitable option.

How to Select the Right Approach for Your Project

There are pros and cons associated with each project management approach.  It’s wise to weigh your options and select the method that will be most beneficial to you, your team, and your stakeholders.

A few things to consider as you think about which approach to use:

  • The number of people on your team, and how much guidance they require
  • If a project allows for flexible changes and risks
  • The level of involvement your stakeholders will have
  • The amount of time you have to complete the project
  • The project’s budget, and if it’s fixed or flexible

A Hybrid Approach

Sometimes your project calls for a blended plan driven and agile approach. This technique allows you to select elements of from both methodologies to get the project done.  For example, you use Agile sprints because the scope of your project might not be well defined at the outset of your project.  You create a general project charter to gain approval, which is a plan driven technique.

Therefore, this hybrid approach takes the best of two methodologies and allows you to apply the most appropriate aspects of both.  If you’re interested in how to build the most effective hybrid approach for your project, consider RMC’s Hybrid Agile eLearning Course to guide you through the process.

Once you get to know the various methodologies available, and you begin to try them out in the real world, you’ll become confident in your ability to choose the right one for every project.

What Are Common Project Management Methodologies?

Popular project management methods include:

  • Scrum – An agile methodology characterized by short, fixed production cycles (sprints) with specific goals, that works well with small, skillful and disciplined teams, and uses short, focused meetings.
  • Extreme programming (XP) – A type of agile methodology that’s focused on collaboration.
  • Critical path method – A method that uses a work breakdown structure to map out milestones, commonly used in traditional approaches.

Since agile is considered an instance of Lean thinking, these practices are often integrated into many agile methodologies:

  • Lean – A method of optimizing the way your team works by reducing waste.
  • Kanban – An agile method that uses a visual representation of the phases and steps that need to be completed throughout a project.

Once you get to know the various approaches and  methodologies available, and you begin to try them out in the real world, you’ll become confident in your ability to choose the right one for every project.

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An Agile Approach to Project Work

Two business people work on their agile approach on project at white board

The year 2020 taught us that the world of work can change in an instant. We have to adapt, modify, and re-imagine the way we work and communicate.

This is what an agile approach to project leadership is all about. But how does one go about managing a project this way? Don’t we have to plan in detail, execute according to plan, manage our baselines and risks? How do we deliver a project when there isn’t a detailed plan in place?

Agile Approach to Projects

  1. Guide to An Agile Approach
  2. Work with Agility
  3. Expand Your Agile Skill Set

Guide to An Agile Approach

Agile Fundamentals: A Comprehensive Guide to Using an Agile Approach answers these questions and more. Mike Griffiths, a thought leader in agile project management, delves into exactly how a project is managed using agile methodologies. There is still planning, just not at the same level of detail. There is still executing the project, but we hold retrospectives as we move through the project, and then make modifications. We still manage risk, but we work with success modes instead of failure modes.

Most importantly, we act as servant leaders. Relationships are the cornerstones of agile projects. As servant leaders we do not manage but rather guide, encourage, and support the team using emotional intelligence and the elements of our agile toolkit, such as a backlog or Kanban board.

Work with Agility

In Agile Fundamentals, Mike shows you the way to working with agility. And the journey can be a fun one: He shows you collaboration games such as Remember the Future, Prune the Product Tree, and Speedboat. He also explains estimating tools such as planning poker, user stories, product roadmaps, and T-shirt sizing.

Agile Fundamentals is divided into three sections to give you the best opportunity for using an agile approach successfully:

Part One: You’ll learn what it means to have an agile mindset. You’ll learn about agile principles and values, and about the different agile methodologies.

Part Two: Mike dives into what it means to be a servant leader; how to lead a development team to success and how to establish a shared vision.

Part Three: You’ll see how to run an agile project, from adaptive planning to estimating, to detecting and solving problems.

The world of work is changing. Leaders must change with it to create efficient teams, (sometimes distributed all over the world), and to produce deliverables that bring value to every stakeholder.

Expand Your Agile Skill Set

If you’re a project leader who wants to dive into working with an agile approach, then Agile Fundamentals is the book you’ve been waiting for.  This essential desk reference breaks down agile in a way that makes it easy to understand and practical to follow.  Agile Fundamentals is available in hard copy or in an online subscription format.  

RMC also offers a self-directed Agile Fundamentals eLearning Course that teaches agile project development, practices, tools, and techniques to immediately use agile methods on your projects.  If you are looking to introduce additional team members to Agile Fundamentals, contact us to learn more about our instructor-led classes.

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Agile Illustrated, A Visual Learner’s Guide to Agility

Programmer working on agile project

Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide serves as a solid guide for anyone who is interested in learning agile, as well as anyone who wants to dive deeper into agile principles.

Below, we cover what makes this book such a valuable asset to project managers interested in, or already working in, agile.

Who Is This Book For?

Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide is for anyone charged with leading a team of people. It is for Scrum masters, project managers, team leads, and group leads.

If your work involves coordinating the efforts of others, this book has been written for you. It explains a model of how to tackle complex projects and work effectively with people. Just as projects differ in size, type, and complexity, so does the agile model, driven by project characteristics.

For team leaders, project managers, development leads, and project practitioners who want to take their delivery skills to the next level, Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide can help. It provides a learning framework and integration points for using more than just agile approaches, so you can be successful in a wider range of project scenarios.

Organizations are often complex and contradictory in their application of standards, processes, and norms. This book takes what you already know from agile and extends that knowledge so it can be more robust, applicable, and adaptive to real-world environments. It explains how to scale agile techniques while minimizing process load, and it explains how to integrate agile approaches into traditional, non-agile environments. You’ll even discover how to use soft skills, such as influence, empathy, and leadership, to gain more acceptance and support when processes and techniques fall short.

Finally, this book shows why and how an integrated approach to mastering industry domain knowledge, traditional project management, leadership, and agile approaches delivers more than the sum of its parts. It describes a view one level up in terms of abstraction and usefulness.

This is not only a “how to do it” book, but also a “how to think about it” book. By providing evidence-based guidance from a broad range of professional disciplines, including lean, project management, economics, psychology, sociology, process management, and change management, it sheds light on a topic that many people find complex.

Perfect for Visual Thinkers!

Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide will appeal to visual thinkers who like to conceptualize the big picture before getting into the details. These people, who are sometimes called “right-brained,” after the portion of the brain responsible for processing images, would rather be shown how something works than told in detail how it works.

If you spend a long time getting the flow of your PowerPoint slides just right before you can focus on adding content and detail, then you are likely right-brained.

Interesting fact: Research by David Hyerle into visual thinking reports that 90% of the information entering the brain is visual. 40% of all nerve fibers connected to the brain are connected to the retina, and a full 20% of the entire cerebral cortex is dedicated to vision, so let’s use it!

Throughout Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide, you’ll be taught the stages of skills progression, and you’ll see how one step builds on the previous step. You’ll also access one-page views of how things relate and fit together. Like having a good map, understanding context and structures spatially can provide you with more confidence to explore new territory and also retreat to familiar ground when needed.

An Experience-Based Approach

You will find that Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide draws on a blend of commercial experience and scientific theory.

Some concepts are the synthesis of several academic research papers. However, where possible, preference is given towards approaches that we have seen work in several organizations.

Examining the origins of research claims often uncovers dated, self-referencing clusters of studies, frequently written by the same author. Or it becomes clear that studies employed paid university students who were motivated and behaved quite differently than commercial sector team members. Therefore, in addition to looking towards academic recommendations for guidance, it’s also wise to look at recent commercial project experiences to gain greater insight.

Diving into Continuous Digital and #NoProjects

So far, we have talked about delivering successful “projects,” but the notion of projects with a defined start, middle, and end is being challenged with recent Continuous Digital and #NoProjects concepts.

As software becomes more critical to competitive advantage, projects become unending because the software-driven products continue to live on and evolve. This is a good sign that shows a business values its products and services and wants to keep investing in them and developing them.

How does this relate to project management, though? Well, project management in many industries is evolving into ongoing product development and delivery. Organizations are arranging themselves around value streams that deliver business benefits.

The principles described in this book about improving our ability towards effective delivery of value apply equally in continuous digital delivery environments and the #NoProjects world.

In time, the organizational delivery construct may no longer be projects, and we will likely switch to more product teams and value streams. However, the tools and techniques that we use to engage and motivate people, and to develop new products, still apply.

So, as you read Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide, whenever you see the word “project,” think also of “products,” “initiatives,” and “value streams.” These are the future, but still rely on the cooperation of people towards a vision.

Why Should You Read This Book?

The world of work is changing. We see it in pockets right now, but a wave of change is coming. Projects are getting more complex, jobs are becoming less permanent, and people are more mobile. This trifecta will spread and accelerate in all industries. People who can see the trend and can navigate the oncoming tsunami will be in high demand and will lead the bulk of the organizational transformations that will happen.

This book describes the mindset and toolkit to rise and thrive in the new world of work. It shows you the knowledge domains that have to be understood, and how to work with others to succeed.

The future is collaborative but built upon skilled individuals. This book is a roadmap and workshop manual for building a smarter you, better positioned for the new realities of the future.

Overall, a Worthy Read!

Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide describes how we can determine the optimal mix of agile and other approaches worth using. It describes tools, such as ranking a project on attributes like size, organizational impact, uncertainty, internal support, criticality, and more, to suggest the recommended mix of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques.

This book also describes the ongoing need to focus on value delivery, pruning ceremonies when they no longer justify their time commitments. This is a dynamic process, not a static framework, much like dealing with the people on your project and in your organization.

Agile Illustrated: A Visual Learner’s Guide is available for purchase now and we highly recommend this book for all of the reasons discussed above. 

Want to learn even more? RMC offers agile courses and self-study materials for those just getting started with agile or those looking to operate more effectively. Contact us for more information or for help getting started!